November/December 2019

By the Numbers
For The Record
Vol. 31 No. 10 P. 34

22.5
Medical malpractice claims in which the use of EHRs contributed to patient injury are on the rise, growing from seven cases in 2010 to this average number of cases per year in 2017 and 2018, according to The Doctors Company. However, the frequency of claims with an EHR factor continues to be low, at 1.1% of all claims closed since 2010.

$85,000
A settlement in which Bayfront Health St. Petersburg agreed to a penalty of this amount marks the first enforcement of the Office for Civil Rights’ HIPAA Right of Access Initiative, which enforces the right of patients to receive access to their records in a timely fashion (ie, within 30 days of the request) and without being overcharged. According to healthitsecurity.com, the case involved a mother who sought health records about her unborn child and was provided access nine months after the initial request was made.

60
Nearly this percentage of the respondents to a Center for Connected Medicine survey cited moving to one EHR as an organizational step being taken to overcome interoperability challenges—much higher than other actions, such as the adoption of health care exchange standards, including Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, cited by 37%.

29,776,527
According to Definitive Healthcare data, psychosis was the top primary diagnosis by diagnosis-related group code in 2018 with an estimated total of 1,713,938. At this total, septicemia or severe sepsis without 96 or more hours of mechanical ventilation with major complications/comorbidities was, by far, the most common secondary diagnosis.

54
This percentage of those surveyed by CynergisTek said the biggest barrier to meeting privacy and security challenges was lack of adequate resources (tools, money, or people), and only 13% was due to senior management buy-in. However, in a follow-up question, 40% responded that they didn’t know whether their boards were more or less involved with cybersecurity and privacy programs than they previously had been.

$4.89 Billion
Under a $10 billion contract last year, the VA plans to transition to Cerner’s EHR. It will cost the agency at least this amount to maintain its current EHR system during the transition, which is slated to take about 10 years, reports Modern Healthcare.

1/3
A Center for Connected Medicine survey found that nearly this fraction of technology executives at US hospitals and health systems indicate their data-sharing efforts are insufficient, even within their own organizations, and fewer than 4 in 10 say they are successfully sharing data with other health systems.